It is scarcely to be marvelled at that the world should have accepted the old verdict. Outside of Germany Marschner has had no existence for more than half a century. In Germany three of his operas may occasionally be heard. All the rest of his list have disappeared from the stage as completely as the hundreds of his compositions in the smaller forms. These three operas, "The Vampire," "The Templar and the Jewess" and "Hans Heiling," not only contain his best music but also exemplify the sum of his contributions to the Romantic movement. In them he appears in his fullest measure complementary to Weber and Spohr. Yet to appreciate this fact it is necessary to view them in the light of the time and the people for which they were created. It is scarcely possible to conceive their existence, much less to perceive their significance under changed conditions and beyond the borders of the German land. The measure of their present popularity in Germany is also the measure of their comparative merit. In them is exhibited Marschner's growth in clearness, truthfulness and forcefulness of expression and his appreciation of Romantic ideals. At this late day it is impossible to perceive anything else than a wicked perversion of those ideals in "The Vampire"; yet it finds a two-fold explanation in the morbid tendency of literature and the stage in Europe two generations ago, and the well-known proneness of the Germans to supernaturalism. The story is an excresence on the face of Romanticism for which the creators of the literary phase of the movement are not responsible. It tells of a nobleman who, having forfeited his life, prolongs it and wins temporary immunity from punishment by drinking the life-blood of his brides, three of whom he is compelled by a compact with the Evil One to sacrifice between midnight and midnight once a year. At the base of this dreadful superstition lies the notion that the Vampire's unconquerable thirst for blood is a punishment visited upon a perjurer. It may be largely fanciful, but it must, nevertheless, not be overlooked in accounting for the popularity of this subject that a degree of sympathy for it among the German people may have been due to the fact that it contains a faint mythological echo. In the Volüspa perjurers are condemned in their everlasting prison-house to wade knee-deep in blood. It is this superstition which prolongs the action in the opera until the fiend has killed two of his victims and stands before the altar with her who had been selected as the third. In treating this gruesome subject Marschner and his librettist compelled their hearers to sup full of horrors; nor did they scorn the melodramatic trick, which survived in the Bertrams and Rigolettos of a later time, of investing a demon with a trait of character calculated to enlist sympathetic pity in his behalf. The direct responsibility for this bit of literary and theatrical pabulum rests with Byron.